It is important to have more than just a home page to have an active and functional platform. The speed and performance of websites and apps rely on complex structures and components. Each element plays a crucial role in ensuring uptime, and you need to check website outage regularly to prevent issues.
What is Website Uptime?
Website uptime refers to the time your website is available to users. If your website is “down,” clients cannot access it, potentially losing business. Even a 404 error, commonly known as a Page Not Found error, can cause internet users to seek services elsewhere, even from their competitors.
That’s why it is necessary to use online tools to check Shopify.com down or find intime information about another platform. Website uptime monitoring refers to regularly tracking a website or application’s availability.
Uptime is a performance metric that measures how long a website is operational and accessible to users. Although website availability and uptime are often used interchangeably, they are different. While availability refers to the percentage of time a system is operational, uptime measures the total time a system operates.
CDN
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) send information to a user’s device. The distance between a CDN and the user impacts download speed because CDNs deliver content. CDNs reduce latency and improve performance by storing content closer to end users. The closer the CDN, the faster the download speed. A multi-CDN approach that covers multiple regions can enhance speed and performance.
Having multiple CDNs is advantageous because it provides failover options during outages. CDN monitoring is crucial for maintaining uptime. IT teams must identify which locations are experiencing outages when using multiple CDNs in different locations.
DNS
When a user types a website URL like example.com into their browser, a Domain Name System (DNS) converts it into a numeric address so that computers and servers can communicate. This is the first step in sending information from one machine to another.
DNS monitoring should be prioritized for improving uptime. Without a functioning DNS, users cannot access websites or applications. It is similar to trying to reach a business without knowing how to get there, resulting in being unable to go beyond the driveway. This can be a terrible situation.
Servers
Websites store their data on servers. If multiple servers are down, the website CDNs won’t be able to deliver any data, which may result in the website crashing. IT teams should monitor their servers to switch to backups in case of a failure.
Third Parties and Cloud Providers
Third parties refer to the components of a website or application not owned by the company but supplied by other sources such as marketing platforms, analytics tools, or other software. Cloud-based third parties are often hosted by SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS providers.
How to Calculate Uptime Percentage?
Calculating uptime percentage is usually done by dividing the total uptime by the total time. This is often shown as a percentage in monitoring systems, even though it could be done by subtracting the downtime from the total time. Using this formula, a system with a 99.999% uptime would only allow 5.25 minutes of outage per year.
Service providers often consider an uptime ratio of 99.99 (which allows for 52 minutes and 36 seconds of downtime per year) or 99.98 (which allows for 1 hour, 10 minutes, and 7 seconds of downtime per year) as acceptable unless the website or service is vital, like hospital systems. However, this calculation only considers the system’s availability, not other factors like performance and function.